Is there no accounting for excess?
HAVANA — Even the very prestigious intellectual Graziella Pogolotti, who has some serious visual disabilities, has managed to notice three recent events that made a big impact in the country.
An excellent article by her, published in the newspaper Juventud Rebelde, ended up reprinted in Granma, the daily newspaper of the Communist Party, “because of its importance” — an unusual step in our journalism.
In essence, Dr. Pogolotti mentioned the Chanel fashion show, the filming of Fast and Furious and the welcome given to the first Miami-Havana cruise ship by some dancers dressed in Cuban flags, an inadequate artistic design. She wrote about the above and added some profound considerations that even the least sophisticated reader could understand. Her topic: our Cubanness.
In a few words, Pogolotti interpreted the popular feeling, an aspect apparently forgotten by those who must make decisions, or at least react with last-minute decisions about the current events. Fact is, the dynamics in which we live forces us to make corrections on the go, an action that in no way is an excuse for foolishness or underestimation.
The Chanel show was an excessive nuisance; so was the car-chase thriller, with half of Havana immobilized and that helicopter swooping over our roofs like an Aedes mosquito on steroids.
Why hasn’t anyone deigned so far to tell us how much the organizers of the movie spectacular and the haute-couture show paid for their performance rights, to which bank account that money went, and in what it will be spent?
As my colleague Marcos Bronstein accurately wrote in his blog Sacando el Jugo (Squeezing the Juice), so far the answer is silence. The public servants act as if they weren’t at the service of the public and weren’t obligated to account for themselves.
Accurate information might remind us of the habitual statement by psychologist and professor Manuel Calviño when he ends his TV program by saying “it’s well worth it.”
A grave error in these difficult times is being incapable of palpating the feelings of the citizenry or, worse, dismissing them. The official discourse and the performance of our media outlets should not be out of step daily.
Summer is coming, a season that many street-corner meteorologists predict will be infernal. Tempers could boil. And I’m not alluding to the adversaries and enemies of the process taking place in Cuba today but to those who are convinced that Cuba must change under the flag of a better socialism — with respect for the will of the majority of its citizens.
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